If they don’t stop small clubs dying, the Premier League will wither too
WHY should they help? In this version of Britain, polarised and angry and fearful, why should the Premier League help anybody? Why should the big clubs help the little clubs in their moment of greatest need? Why should the rich help the poor? Why should they do anything apart from sit back and watch them die and crow about the survival of the fittest?
Why should clubs earning £100million a season from television contracts care if teams in League One and League Two, who are being asked to exist on thin air now that supporters are exiled from stadiums, go to the wall. Why should they care if the football landscape that has existed in this country for more than a century is changed irrevocably?
Why? Because football in this country is not about us and them. Or it shouldn’t be.
It is not about big versus small. Or it shouldn’t be. It is about us all being in this together. It is about what Spurs fans did last week when they started buying up Leyton Orient merchandise as a gesture of solidarity after Orient lost £150,000 in TV money when the clubs’ Carabao Cup tie was lost to coronavirus.
There was something beautiful about that. It symbolised something. The cynics say that the idea of communality in football is antiquated, but it isn’t. Not amongst fans anyway.
Instinctively, English football fans recognise the value of tradition and the fact that if one part of the game in this country suffers, the rest of it will suffer, too. It is a shame some of the billionaires who run our top clubs can’t see it, too.
FOOTBALL is not a loose association of avaricious hedge fund managers, however much the Burnley manager, Sean Dyche, might wish to draw that comparison. Football in this country is about more than that. Or it should be. It is about communality and togetherness. And it is about English football only being as strong as the weakest of the 92 clubs.
You can call some of this naive if you want to. I understand that. But when I think of naivety, I prefer to think of Premier League clubs spending £ 30m, £ 40m, £ 50m or more on players this summer, of all summers, and then going to the Government with a straight face and saying they don’ t have the money to bail out the EFL. That’s naive.
So forgive me if I don’t take any lectures about naivety from the brilliant businessmen who run some of our top clubs and if I remind them of what they appear to have forgotten or what they never understood in the first place: that if the lower leagues in this country wither and die, then those clubs currently at the top of the pyramid will wither and die, too.
Clubs in the lower leagues, and beyond, are integral to their communities and they are integral to the health of football in general in t his country. They are al l part of a whole.
That’s one of the reasons why the government, to its credit, is said to be on t he verge of providing financial assistance to clubs in the National League to help them survive the next few months.
However much some Premier League owners might like to think the top division is an island, it is not. It only exists because the rest of t he pyramid exists. Their strength, their appeal, depends on the rest of the pyramid.
It is not independent of it. The magic of English football lies in the four divisions and the struggle to get to the top of them. Take that away and the Premier League will not be the same. The magic of English football lies in the dream, however improbable, that any one of the 92 clubs can make it to the top. That is why the idea of no relegation is anathema to us.
The magic lies in a network of football communities spreading across the whole country.
Destroy that and you destroy the Premier League, too. Not immediately, perhaps, but gradually and irrevocably. The death of lower league clubs will spread upwards like disease.
Listen to Andy Holt, the owner of League One Accrington Stanley, one of the best and most responsible football custodians in our top four divisions. ‘ Football in this country is a social and communal entity and a national treasure,’ he told me yesterday. ‘It cannot be left to market forces. The top clubs wield so much power but they are only there because of the rest of the pyramid.’
THERE is so much to admire about the Premier League but if some clubs are too stupid to help themselves, so addicted to spending that they have nothing left in reserve, then how can they be relied upon to recognise that they have a responsibility to help others and preserve the health of the pyramid?
That’s the problem. The model was broken before Covid- 19 hit sport. It is just that the coronavirus has shone a light on it. Last week, the Premier League clubs sought to impose conditions on the EFL for helping them through the next six months until supporters are allowed to return to grounds.
The arrogance of that was another indication that something more needs to be done to fix the system.
If the clubs that find themselves in the top division at the moment will only help on their terms, they s hould be f orced t o hel p on everyone’s terms. It is time that some form of statutory regulation was imposed on English football for the general good.
One of Andy Holt’s ideas is a tax on transfer fees that is paid into a central fund. There are plenty of other ways that monies — monies corralled by the Premier League since its inception — could be distributed more evenly.
It is time we started to look at a wider form of the revenue-sharing model f a voured by t he NFL and others. English football is an eco-system. If it is smart, it will see the hardship that has been visited upon it by the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity.
The Premier League is something for us to be proud of but how much better it would be, how much more proud of it we would be, if it let go of some of its greed and spread its wealth.
If it doesn’t, if six more months without fans kill off a slew of clubs in the lower leagues, then English football will start to die from the bottom up.